Billy Newman Photo Podcast | 107 Eclipse Totality
The total solar eclipse of August 21 2017
Produced by Billy Newman and Marina Hansen
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Produced by Billy Newman and Marina Hansen
Link
Website Billy Newman Photo https://billynewmanphoto.com/
YouTube https://www.youtube.com/billynewmanphoto
Facebook Page https://www.facebook.com/billynewmanphotos/
Twitter https://twitter.com/billynewman
Instagram https://www.instagram.com/billynewman/
About https://billynewmanphoto.com/about/
107
Hey, what’s going on? This is Billy Newman and you’re listening to the Billy Newman photo podcast for August 23 2017. It’s a Wednesday, we just finished up with the eclipse on the 21st. Just a couple days ago, I made it up into the path of totality. It’s one of the real benefits of living so close to a, I guess we really, I, you know, I really almost took it for granted for a long time that there’s just going to be such an excellent example of a total or total eclipse Express right over Oregon, and over Idaho, and really awesome to see everyone’s images from it as as we’re kind of getting out of the eclipse. But just just two days now, it seems like my Instagram feed has been filled with all of these photographs from totality, some really cool stuff, some some awesome stuff from Smith rock. So Chris Picard and his team of people putting together a lot of stuff with like a, like a slack liner in between monkey face and the main bit of Smith rock right during totality as the sun was right right there. But really cool that they were able to line stuff up like that. I think it was some of the people on the team or some of the people around there. Line it up in there’s some really cool stuff like the the rock climbers on the side of the mountain, kind of roped off but with the sun, eclipsed in totality by the moon, which is that that ring of the corona? Is that what it is, like the crown and the sun. But hey, is, by the way, I’m out on the mobile studio, I’m taking a walk right now. There’s a big cloud over me. Big drops of rain fall on me as I’m walking through this field. But the location that we looked at the eclipse it was ended up actually being real similar to what, what the environment I’m in right now is, it’s a big open fields that have just recently been harvested for all the grass, like I talked about a little bit before, it’s sort of common for the crop cycle for the Willamette Valley. This time of August, they’ve already tilled all the fields, they’ve, you know, they’ve harvested all the hay, they pulled it all out. And now they’ve tilled most of the fields. And they’re going over, I see a guy out in the field right now. tractor and around trying to trying to plow through some of the remaining topsoil underneath and kind of turn it over again, so that they can replant. And what is it like two months, there’ll be grass, it’d be sheep, it’ll be all that stuff for the fall. And then they do it again next year. And I guess that that is a profitable enough system to keep the system going. So for our story of the eclipse, in the totality, we went up into a spot like that, where they had just cleared out all the grass, and so they’ve just been dirt, but there’s really nobody out there. It’s really flat. It’s really nice to especially out here in the in the valley, there’s a lot of opportunity to see horizon, to horizon. And that was something that I wanted, just because of some of the interesting dynamics of what the light does. Right at the moment of when it when it really gets into totality. You know, now almost regretfully, I we didn’t make it up into totality. We made it up pretty close to like the town of Albany or sort of sort of across from Corvallis. But we were out still in the fields. And in that area, I think we got like a minute and 30 seconds of totality. For now I’m regretfully thinking man, like, like an eclipse junkie, I’m thinking man, if only I could have gotten just a little bit further, a little closer to that center line, to see the eclipse. To see totality for just a few more seconds, because it’s so cool and so rare and so fleeting, too. They went by too fast. The sad thing about trying to be a photographer. I don’t know, sometimes, sometimes I miss it. You know, that’s the frustrating part. The phenomena you want to see, you get, but you don’t get to see what a strange thing seems like a weird way to be connected to a moment. But it was a really interesting moment. It was really cool. You know, we set up really early, we went out like 3am to drive up there to get to a location where it’d be it’d be a wide open spot that no one would be and no one would bothers another car. So we we went out there we were kind of parked out for a while watching the stars a really cool thing. I don’t know if anybody else got up really early, but you can see Venus in the morning is super bright view of Venus in the morning. And then the sun comes up, you know, and then you can see Venus. But then when we got to totality again, we look south.
And that’s the cool thing about totality is that if you’re in the location, and you’re experiencing totality, you’ll actually see a lot of the stars come out even for a few seconds. But But yeah, I can see Venus I can see Sirius I can see a few things on the horizon line, which is really interesting. So a few stars kind of near the totality mark two so man just so fascinating how all that looks, but it was cool kind of tracking that for the morning. Like 4am 5am 6am to what we couldn’t see it anymore, and then being able to start it again in about 1015 when we started coming into darkness, so it was really cool. Man, what an amazing event. Sarah is 145 on its apparition of August 21 2017. I guess there’s a chance for I think it’s another Eclipse and like, 2022 2024 I wish I knew better. I don’t know. I forgot. I should, but that’s part of a different Sarah cycle, right? That’d be really weird. I was trying to think about other times I’ve seen solar eclipses, we saw like the annular one a few years ago, when I was a kid and middle school, or high school, there was like a partial one that we saw. That was really just a bit just kind of clipping into the sun. I think I saw like another partial one years before that. Another partial when I was in elementary school, I’ve been trying to keep up with those. But man, this was unlike anything like that. Nothing like a partial eclipse. The moment in totality, it was just super quick, but super stunning. To see that really deep darkness from space kind of come over the sun, and must have been a really incredible spiritual experience for for all of mankind that has come before us over the millennia that didn’t have the communication to understand what was happening. You know, could you imagine how crazy that would be? How much pain ammonia that would create, you know, if you didn’t understand it, didn’t know. But you knew it happened on some very rare, not really understandable cycle and nature. Super strange, especially before you understood space, and that there are things beyond the planet earth that you know, the heliocentric system, all that stuff was really late to understood way after the point that they had really mapped out. The pattern of eclipses quite well. It’s still strange that, you know, you could understand all the timing of everything, but physically not understand materially. And scientifically, you know, through any kind of evidence or effect what it actually was really fascinating stuff. Awesome to be up there. Awesome to set up, we did a lot of media stuff for the clubs, we had a video camera going, getting our experience of it, we had had a handful of cameras in our hands, at all times had a camera on a tripod with a filter on it, that that was set up to do a time interval so that we could get photographs of the eclipse pattern as it moved through the Eclipse and then out to the the other side. But But Wow, what an awesome time. Really cool to be out there. really tired while we were out there, we made a bunch of hot chocolates and put them in thermoses and took off up to our spot. And it was interesting to see it fill in it seemed like about seven o’clock, eight o’clock. You just saw constant traffic coming up northbound into the totality one. And then on the way out. There’s like a ton of traffic. So we built we beat all the traffic in, right? Because we got there like 4am but we didn’t beat all the traffic out. We left you know a little while after the eclipse have gotten going. And so a lot of people from Corvallis, Salem, wherever I five trying to get off and out of the way, all those people were kind of crowding these smaller roads in the Willamette Valley. So even like Peoria road, maybe that’s what we were on at a point. They just had this big backup that went all the way into Harrisburg and Junction City. I think it cleared up a little bit after that, but But yeah, I heard from some people and seen some Instagram stories and some snaps and stuff from folks that went out on the 226 out to Madras, Oregon out toward Mitchell, and all the festivals, all those people, those campers, they’re all leaving, at the same time trying to jam back to their job on Tuesday,
or whatever it was. But I heard that the 226 was just god awful for a while because all this people that I think you know I complained about last time on this podcast saw a lot of the people that it sort of in a crowded way. But more slowly trickled in from Thursday, Friday and Saturday to get into the spot for Sunday, Monday in the event of the eclipse. Oh, those people they all left at the same time. You know, four days of heavy traffic moving in, all concentrated down to just a couple hours after the eclipse trying to move out. So I’m sure that was a wonderful time for a lot of people. You know, I heard from a friend of mine. He was out in prineville. They went up to the Painted Hills. And they had another set of people with and they went back you know group two, they go back on highway 97 my friend they go around the long way. They take 395 down, they head over to Lakeview they head over to K falls and then they head over to Southern Oregon. They’re back. And they still be grouped to that other set of friends that took the 97 down, still stuck in traffic, still kind of crawling through it. So I really don’t envy anybody that ended up on the freeway on the highways of Oregon yesterday, but I’m sure it was kind of pandemonium all over the US is as you kind of stretch on and on. But so cool to see how the media you know, that’s a really awesome thing about this is this is probably the most recorded celestial event ever in human history. And I’m sure the most the most recorded most well captured like total solar eclipse like event that’s ever happened. So really cool that so many people jumped into it. So many people participated in making, you know, media making things about it, that are that are interested in it, but Yeah, awesome. So cool to see, I was I was really blown away. Like, get to witness it. I don’t know why I saw the annular one years ago. Really cool. amazing to see. But being in the totality shadow, like anyone who experienced it this last week, they know it’s just like an otherworldly, surreal, almost alien kind of experience to watch your son go out to watch it really get dark and sort of an unusual way to watch the, the, what do you call it, it’s like it’s like a lenticular effect. Maybe I’m using that word wrong. But this lenticular effect of the sunlight from an eclipse coming down and then being being broken up by some other object like a pinhole camera or something, you know, or the pinhole Viewing System for an eclipse for the pinhole on a piece of paper, and then you look at it at the the reflection that it shows on to the onto the backboard, you’ll see the eclipse, it’s like it’s lenzing through that tiny pinhole like the same way a pinhole camera would work. And then it’s lensing it and focusing it onto that back panel. So that’s really interesting. It’s cool how it does that. But the same thing happens like as you’re looking at it, or as you’re looking at another camera, or if you’re looking at the shadows on the trees. So there’s like this really weird, surreal light, where you can kind of see, it’s like, the sun itself is dimmer, it’s not just here in the shade, it’s not the same as a shadow, or a cloud, it really feels different. It’s really exciting. So I’m really happy with them with a good bit of the stuff that they came out from the eclipse, you know, photo wise, when I got home, I started ingesting a lot of the media that we’d had, I think a lot of the stuff from the DEA 7000 that was set up doing an interval time lapse with a filter on it as the clips kind of progressed, those came out pretty well i think it was pretty, pretty sharp most of the time, I got a handful of photos, during totality that I really like really cool to see just the you know, just everything about it, the kind of the burst of the Quran around the sun, the darkness in the sky, or everywhere. All that was really cool. So that’s great,
great to get that captured. You know, the tough thing is, is in event events like this, especially when it’s the sky, especially when your entire country that’s an airplane going overhead. Especially, you know, once your entire country, so many people are going to get the same kind of photographs. So I really appreciate people that put in some way or creativity to it. I really appreciate just what I did it just kind of getting a cool souvenir photo for myself, right. But there’s a lot of cool stuff that that we made kind of around it. I put that up over the next couple of days. Good thing is is I got another photo news. And to conclude our broadcast moving on from the Sarah cycle from the eclipses for all that stuff. I think coming out this weekend, I got a wedding to shoot. So I’ll be doing some stuff for that. I’ll be fine. I got a couple other jobs coming up next weekend. So I’ll be cool. I’m trying to plan a vacation is it ever a vacation I think what I’m planning is a photo trip where I’m going to be up all the time. But it’ll be great and really rewarding. You know that’s what we all want to be doing is planning trips more and then executing on them getting out to places making stuff happen. And I mean really like anybody that’s a photographer knows that like that participation and that part of the work is so much of what it is to try and make new stuff or make new content make new art I hate content I should I gotta stop saying content this podcasts content but well yeah shoot yeah looking photos are probably content too I say it pejoratively but it’s probably fine with what I want to make is art or you know creative stuff doesn’t people We’re interested in Sunday, we’ll get there. So I think that’s most everything that I got to talk about on this episode of The Billy Newman photo podcast, I’m gonna finish up my walk past the BlackBerry vines, pass these dirt fields here in the Willamette Valley, gets my truck finished my day at work, finish taking some product photos, finish, oh, I’m gonna put up a bunch of these videos that I’ve been talking about some of the photos from totality, photos, it totality, they’re on Instagram, you can check out my Instagram story, there’s a couple extra pieces in there. I put up a video clip just as a post on Instagram. That’s, that’s the period of totality is a quick time lapse where it’s kind of interesting to sort of see the see the sweep of darkness sort of Passover, and then pass by. And it seems like such a quick moment in the time lapse, I’m going to put up the whole period of totality, to just sort of have that real time experience. I miss it. I watched it a bunch of times, and I think shoot, if only I could do it again. But it was really cool, really an amazing moment to get to be a part of really cool to get to capture it. And I think I think I got to become a world traveler. scout out ways to hit all of the eclipses think we’re lucky enough to have him you know, every few years is about how it works out for how many saros cycles there are active but so few of them are going to be totality like what we saw. And so few of them are really going to be in such an excellent position. Meanwhile, I was like, two hours north of my house. couldn’t get any easier than that. Next time I have to go to like South America. be harder. So check out my Instagram page. It’s at Billy Newman. website spilling him and photo calm dimensioned redesigning on that page. Let me know if helps. And yeah, let me know what’s going on with this podcast. What do you want to do with it? Say me, Listen, what do you want to hear? You let me know. Talk to you guys soon. Bye.